Anyone who has strolled around an army or civil helicopter show in the USA lately cannot help but have noticed some strange rotary-wing birds that promise to morph between troop-carrying assault machines and armed gunships, bristling with cannons and Hellfire missiles. Full-scale mock-ups of the Bell Helicopter V-280 Valor and the Sikorsky S-97 Raider, and models of some other radical concepts, are – their creators hope – the future of rotary-wing aviation for the US military.
Sometime in 2018 or 2019, Karem Aircraft will power up what it believes should be the American military’s next vertical lift system, the company’s patented optimum-speed tiltrotor.
Best known as the creator of the modern military drone, the company’s founder and namesake Abraham Karem is now devoting his attention to vertical takeoff and landing tiltrotors, with blades that rotate at the most efficient speed during all phases of hover and forward flight.
The frontrunner for this optimum-speed system was the A160 Hummingbird UAV: created by Karem’s Frontier Aircraft and later acquired by Boeing Defense, Space & Security. It demonstrated a highly efficient helicopter configuration that flew past 18h during one test.
The first Future Vertical Lift aircraft to be fielded by the Army will come in the medium-lift category, where attack and cargo lift helicopters reside, Maj. Gen. William Gayler, the new Army Aviation Center of Excellence commander at Fort Rucker, Ala., said at the Aviation Association of America’s Mission Solutions Summit Friday.
Gayler said that since Congress required the Army to consider the FVL program as a joint program to include the Marine Corps and the Air Force, the need to be joint is driving the decision on which type of helicopter will be built first. The Army is still leading the effort.
The Army’s acquisition approach divides up the type of helicopters to be built as a family of helicopters to replace the service’s current fleet into five “capability sets.” The first set is the lightest variant while the fifth is the heaviest. Capability set 3 refers to the medium-lift variant.
Because the Marines and Air Force are more interested in a medium-lift, the Army has decided to focus on that weight class for the first helicopters that will be fielded starting in the early 2030s, according to Gayler.
“Since it’s a DoD joint program, we think the right answer is to go with [capability set 3] with other services, but we obviously will still be very interested in 1 or 2 as well,” Gayler said.
There has been talk about whether the first variant of FVL would be a light reconnaissance-type helicopter in order to fill a gap left open when the Army decided to retire the OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopters. The service is temporarily filling the gap by teaming AH-64 Apache Attack helicopters with Shadow unmanned aircraft systems.
But Gayler’s comments seem to put that debate to rest.
AVX Aircraft of Benbrook, Texas has responded to the US Army’s request for information on the smallest of five planned Future Vertical Lift (FVL) capability sets with two 7.5t (16,700lb) winged coaxial compound helicopter configurations that the company’s chief executive describes as vertical takeoff fighter aircraft for light reconnaissance, attack, assault and medical evacuation missions.
The baseline swept-wing, 13.4m (44ft) diametre rotor concept would be powered by two 3,000shp Improved Turbine Technology Programme (ITEP) engines and is designed to meet a demanding set of core requirements proposed by the US Army in its “Capability Set 1” RFI document. The requirements that emerged for that next-generation rotorcraft category required a more robust design than the 4.5t (10,000lb) light single that AVX discussed with the Army back in January for Capability Set 1 (CS1), prior to the 18 February RFI release.
In West Palm Beach, Florida, and Amarillo, Texas, two different aircraft are coming together in a sprint to the starting line of the Army’s much anticipated flight demonstrations of future helicopter concepts in 2017.
The Army plans to design and field a future vertical lift aircraft and is expected to kick off that program of record in the 2019 time frame. The expectation is to buy a new family of helicopters through a competition and field the new aircraft at some point in the early 2030s, although the Army has talked about speeding up that fielding timeline to the late 2020s.
But first the Army plans to demonstrate Joint Multi-Role (JMR) air vehicle capability at a 2017 flight demonstration in order to help the service fully define requirements for the Future Vertical Lift (FVL) program.
A Bell Helicopter and Lockheed Martin team is mating the entire wing -- which is one big part -- onto the fuselage in Texas of its advanced tiltrotor concept the V-280 Valor, according to Vince Tobin, Bell’s vice president for advanced tiltrotor systems.
Sikorsky and Boeing have all of its Defiant coaxial helicopter parts in fabrication, some have already been delivered to the final assembly facility in Florida, Pat Donnelly, Boeing’s program director, said. Notably, the fuselage is in California being assembled and the team plans to conduct flight loads verification before shipping it to Florida.
The US House Armed Services panel on tactical air and land forces says in its mark of the fiscal year 2017 defence policy bill that current funding levels for FVL are “inadequate”.
The legislative proposal, which will be considered by the full committee on 27 April, seeks a briefing by the army on its FVL and Joint-MultiRole Technology Demonstrator efforts. That briefing would include a status report on the Bell V-280 Valor and Sikorsky-Boeing SB-1 Defiant programmes as well as an analysis of “potential options and required resources” for accelerating FVL.
As the Pentagon considers the future of military vertical lift, Bell Helicopter is in talks with the US Navy and US Air Force to design a next-generation tiltrotor solution that could be ready by 2025.
Bell is partnered with Lockheed Martin to build a rotorcraft flight demonstrator as part of the US Army’s Joint Multi-Role program, which will gauge the art of the possible for the path ahead. The demonstrator program will inform the Army’s Future Vertical Lift effort to buy a new state-of-the-art family of helicopters in the 2030s.
But the demonstration effort may have implications beyond the Army. The Pentagon has indicated that FVL may eventually replace the Navy, US Marine Corps and Air Force military helicopters as well.
And then there were five. There were already going to be four different aircraft in the Future Vertical Lift (FVL) family, from light to medium to heavy to “ultra.”
Now it’s almost certain that the medium FVL will be split into two separate versions: a smaller attack/reconnaissance aircraft and a larger troop-carrying assault craft. What’s more, the Army’s aviation chief said today, they might even end up using entirely different forms of propulsion, for example with one being a tiltrotor (like the V-22 Osprey) and the other being a “compound” helicopter with a pusher propeller and coaxial blades (like the Sikorsky X2 or the Eurocopter X-3).
“Really, the medium category is going to be two aircraft with two capability sets,” Maj. Gen. Michael Lundy, commanding general of the Aviation Center of Excellence at Fort Rucker told an Association of the United States Army aviation symposium. The logic of splitting the medium lift category into different aircraft will be discussed Friday at a meeting of an FVL executive steering group that includes officers from all the armed services, Lundy added.
“We’re going to talk about where we’re heading,” Lundy said, emphasizing that no decisions are being made at this stage: Much will depend on the results of flight tests in 2017 and 2018 of technology demonstrator aircraft being developed by Bell Helicopter Textron Inc. — the tiltrotor — and a team of Boeing Company and Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. — the coaxial rotors — under the Joint Multirole (JMR) program. An industry official, however, said the Army briefed Bell and the Boeing/Sikorsky team earlier this week on the fact that service leaders think the attack and assault versions of the medium-lift FVL will need to be two different aircraft.
The JMR is one of the first concrete steps in the long-range FVL initiative, which aims to develop new, far faster and more agile vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft for all the services in four different sizes: light, medium, heavy and ultra.
The initial requirements for the JMR Technology Demonstrator (JMR-TD) call for attack and utility versions of an aircraft that weighs about 30,000 pounds at takeoff, can fly faster than 230 knots (about 265 miles per hour), can carry as many as 12 troops about 230 miles in the utility version and then loiter for half an hour before returning to base without refueling.
Bell Helicopter is beginning to manufacture parts for its new V-280 Valor tilt-rotor aircraft, a next-generation helicopter being developed as part of the Army’s Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator, or JMR TD program.
The program is an Army-led joint program designed to replace the Army’s current fleet of helicopters.
Bell unveiled a full-scale mock-up of the V-280 Valor on the floor at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Annual Meeting and Exposition in Washington, D.C., in order to showcase the configuration and design of its new high-speed platform.
Slated to fly by 2017, the V-280 is engineered to reach speed of 280 knots, achieve a combat range up to 800 nautical miles and perform in what’s called “high-hot” conditions — described as 95-degrees Fahrenheit and 6,000-feet.
Bell plans to leverage the technological gains made by its construction of the V-22 Osprey, a tilt-rotor aircraft now in service which was first produced in the late 1980s.
It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better yet to learn from other people’s. On Friday, I watched three battle-scarred acquisition experts — including the admiral who turned the F-35 around — advise a young officer from the Future Vertical Lift initiative, who was furiously taking notes. The panel’s theme: how FVL, which plans to replace a host of current helicopters, can avoid the errors of past programs like the F-35. The good news is the single most important lesson-learned is one FVL is already acting on. The bad news is that FVL’s approach, at least by one assessment, still raises half a dozen “red flags.”
The panel’s top three pointers: split the program into manageable pieces, take advantage of commercial helicopter expertise worldwide, and get Congress on board from the beginning.
The Pentagon must split FVL into multiple programs, developing a different aircraft for each set of mission requirement. That’s the opposite of a single mega-program trying to meet everyone’s needs with variants of one design, the approach behind the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
“Start separate programs when the money is ready,” advised retired Vice Adm. David Venlet, who knows the mistakes made by the F-35 program, since he took it over at its lowest point. “Those separate lines will be easier to defend and manage and, I think, have a better chance of success.”
FVL is already on that path, said Lt. Col. Alison Thompson, special assistant for rotorcraft to Pentagon procurement chief Frank Kendall. The sheer diversity of requirements for future rotorcraft demands a split approach. FVL is looking at four classes of rotorcraft — light, medium, heavy, and ultra-heavy — which will probably end up as four separate programs.
In fact, Thompson told me and another reporter, there may well be five programs. The medium FVL is set to enter service first, sometime in the early 2030s, but “if you look at the medium class” — comparable to the current H-60 Black Hawk/Sea Hawk series and Marine H-1s — “it is very broad, and we already know there’s not one platform can cover that spectrum of requirements,” she told us. That means “medium” may need to be split in two.
Even within a given weight class, there’s the question whether a single program can successfully produce both utility and attack versions of a given design. “It would be very desirable,” Thompson told us, and the Marines manage it in the medium category with their UH-1Y Huey transport and AH-1W Super Cobra gunship, which have about 85 percent of their parts in common. By contrast, the Army’s UH-60 Black Hawk and its AH-64 Apache are entirely different designs, but, said Patterson,” if you look at the things any helicopter needs to fly — drive train, engine, communications — “there are lot of things you can have in common.”
